Month: May 2018

There are more insights and updates coming out in regards to the collapse of The Roseanne Barr show that was just canned by ABC TELL-LIE-VISION.

The Number #1 Show Is Now Off The Air

Roseanne Barr went into meltdown on Twitter overnight on Tuesday as she retweeted a stream of abusive, controversial and doctored material after her show was cancelled over her racist remarks about Valerie Jarrett.

The star of America’s top TV show also last night blamed Ambien for saying Jarrett looked like the lovechild of the ‘Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes’ before saying she also ‘mistakenly thought she [Jarrett] was white’.

Among hundreds of retweets Barr reposted comments including an image of Jarrett’s face next to a character from Planet of the Apes, a fake tweet claiming Jarrett had said she wanted to make America more Islamic, and a doctored image of Whoopie Goldberg wearing a t-shirt of Donald Trump shooting himself in the head.

The stream of retweets came alongside dozens of tweets from Barr herself, in which she apologized for her first racist comments, blamed sleeping drug Ambien and claimed she thought the target of her racist Twitter rant was white.

The change is very subtle but you notice it still the same. What is it? The darting of eyes in the supermarket here in America as patrons (we call them guests), decide if they should pass you on the left or on the right.

Dystopian & Atomized America

The reason that most people don’t know is that the level of wireless wi-fi and radiation coming off portable smartphone devices, plus the cloning off of your thinking skills is enough to take for one person.

In atomization, the subcultural mode’s local communities cannot hold together, because they no longer deliver adequate meaning. The subcultural solution to the problems of self and society—intermediate-scale subsocieties that buffer individuals from national institutions—failed.

Instead, society moves onto global interactive media. Internet social networks support larger, geographically dispersed virtual communities. You no longer need to be in the happening place to get access to a genre or scene. You may not know the gender, race, or nationality of some of your closest friends. It is wonderful to find people who share your nearly-unique interests—but can online relationships replace in-person ones? Can electronic communities provide the same benefits as local ones?

The vestiges of systematic social organization are crumbling. As culture and society atomize, it becomes impossible to maintain a coherent ideology. Religions decohere into vague “spirituality,” and political isms give way to bizarre, transient, reality-impaired online movements. Decontextualized, contradictory, intensely-proclaimed religious and political “beliefs” displace legacy systems of meaning. These are not beliefs in an ordinary sense, but advertisements of personal qualities and tribal identification. The atomized mode generates paranoia, because without the systematic mode’s “therefores,” its structure of justification, there are no memetic defenses against bad ideas.

Technology divides us more than anything else. The more I read and observe, the more I am convinced of this.

Dystopia is everywhere. No longer just a narrative form in the vein of 1984 or Soylent Green, the very word is seeping into our daily news and culture, invoked as readily in the pubs of London as the checkpoints of Gaza. Far from “an imagined … society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic,” dystopia is now used to describe Facebook, Brexit, biometric data, militancy, antibiotic resistance, and HQ Trivia.

A 2017 article in the Nation summed up a great deal of liberal feelings about the current political climate: “With the election of an uber-narcissist incapable of distinguishing between fact and fantasy, all the dystopian nightmares that had gathered like storm clouds on the horizon—nuclear war, climate change, a clash of civilizations—suddenly moved overhead.”

Of course, the Western political and economic upheavals of the past few years are about as dystopian as a party balloon next to the reality of life in, say, North Korea, whose government sums up the rights of its citizens with a simple phrase—“One for all and all for one”—better known in the West for a book that is probably not discussed much in Pyongyang. Like Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany before it, the totalitarian oppression of the DPRK feels so remote that it becomes almost pantomime. The hysterical weeping of party officials at the death of Kim Jong-il and the assassination of Kim Jong-un’s defector brother, with the killers allegedly told it was part of a “prank” show, feel closer to fiction than fact—stories to be marvelled at, rather than profound human truths. Propaganda and history collide, blurring the lines between fiction and reality; as these lines move, so does our cultural understanding of dystopia.

The first time I blogged about the reboot of the Roseanne Barr show, my final question was: “How long did I think the show would last before it gets pulled?”

Now we need to ask ourselves, “If one tweet in bad taste can cause a popular television show to be canceled, maybe we need to dump Twitter and Facebook?”

ABC has cancelled its reboot of “Roseanne” after star Roseanne Barr tweeted that former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett looks like “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes had a baby.”

“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant, and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show.”— ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey

The details: Just yesterday, Barr tweeted false conspiracy theories connecting Chelsea Clinton to George Soros — which were retweeted by Donald Trump Jr. In the past, she has frequently tweeted pro-Trump conspiracy theories, controversial topics and criticized prominent Democrats.Earlier this afternoon, Wanda Sykes, a consulting producer on the sitcom, said she will not be returning to the show citing the tweet.After her tweet, which was later deleted, Barr apologized and said she was quitting Twitter:

Vinyl records continue to sell and now there is industry talk of HD Vinyl next year. With all of the competition for Streaming Services, do you think that HD Vinyl will take the market by storm? Stranger things have happened. Hell, I remember Quad Vinyl in 1968.

Yeah man, I just had to look up Carlos Santa, Black Magic Woman that was released on the Album Abraxas in 1973. Oh man, now HD Vinyl? I am loving it!

‘High-definition vinyl’ could be spinning on your turntable by next year

Vinyl records are in the midst of a surprising renaissance, fueled not only by millennial nostalgia but by high-tech turntables. As CD and digital music sales continue to decline due to online streaming services like Spotify, CNBC reports that vinyl LP sales increased to 13 million in 2016 — their highest level since 1991.

Now, an Austrian start-up named Rebeat Innovations is hoping to give the venerable medium itself a high-tech boost with an innovation it’s calling “high-definition vinyl.”

The company filed a patent in 2016 for “3D-based topographical mapping combined with laser inscription technology,” which it says will reduce the manufacturing time by 60 percent.

Founder Günter Loibl told Pitchfork that the company has received nearly $5 million in funding for HD vinyl, with a new $600,000 laser system on the way and plans for five test stampers at selected plants. The new process produces vinyl LPs with higher fidelity, better volume, consistent quality, and longer playing times than traditional records.

Rebeat, founded by Guenter Loibl (pictured) back in 2001, started as a CD and DVD distributor. In 2006, Rebeat expanded into digital music distribution. In 2009, Rebeat Digital became the first digital distributor to integrate royalty accounting into their distribution application.

In 2015, Rebeat MES (for Music Enterprise Software) was born, the first – and still the only – distribution company to offer a fully-flexible distribution matrix. MES was designed to meet a broad range of client needs. It even allows third-party aggregators to be added into our clients’ tracking dashboards.

In 2016, Mr. Loibl had this crazy idea to make vinyl records with lasers 🙂 We simply called it HD Vinyl. We think this is just one of many groundbreaking ideas ahead.

There has never been a better time to take back control of your career. You can be a solo artist or a group. The time is now. Not only is this the time to push your music career, but the truth is also that you can have one now because of all of the tools that you could ever need are right online.

In future postings, I’ll be sharing with you some basic strategies for forming your music company. This is an exciting time for YOU! This is YOUR TIME so go for it!

The future of music is about power for artists, no matter the medium.

The music industry is at a turning point, with artists demanding more money and power. The problem? There are so many ways to accomplish these goals, to the point where no one quite knows which form it will take.

This leaves us with questions about the future of the industry. How will we purchase, listen to, and support music made by artists? How do we give them the power they demand, while ensuring that consumers are also getting what they want?

At TNW Conference this week, our Music Summit track will highlight some emerging trends in the industry. Our lineup of speakers will share their take on the future of music, to shed some light on the confusion we’re currently facing.

Let’s dive into some promising tech mediums that might give artists the power and money they want.

Giving artists full music rights

Forbes recently showcased a new company on the block: Kobalt. As a service provider, it’s giving artists 100 percent of their music rights. As it currently stands in the industry, this is a big change. Kobalt acts as a centralized database where streams from Spotify, for example, directly give money to the artist. It eliminates the middleman that’s so common in the industry, with record labels taking a big cut.

Kobalt has already attracted some big names — most recently, it’s been working with Childish Gambino and ZAYN. It seems like the concept makes a lot of sense to artists, as immediately receiving profits for music is one of the biggest problems that the industry faces.

Companies like Kobalt could be a way forward but as it’s still relatively new, we’ll wait and see.

Blockchain, blockchain, blockchain

This leads us to another — quite similar — innovation that we’ve been talking about for years. Artists like Imogen Heap and Pitbull are advocating for the same change in the industry, but through a different medium.

By harnessing blockchain and their own cryptocurrencies, artists can take back money and power. Fans can purchase songs directly from the artists through their own version of Bitcoin, effectively cutting out the record labels from the equation.

This isn’t new information. The infrastructure of companies like Kobalt seems to do this in a different way, and doesn’t require listeners to change their consumption habits. That might be why blockchain (in the music industry) is all talk, and no action.

As some critics have already said, if blockchain was the answer it would have happened by now. There’s also a larger concern: the cost of purchasing music via blockchain would be much more expensive than a monthly subscription to Spotify Premium — so where’s the incentive for consumers?

So where do we go from here?

It seems like a real coin toss at the moment. The exact medium or method isn’t clear, but it seems to me that there’s a defined theme that we can expect in the future of the music industry. Artists are crying out for more money and power. This seems to be the case whether technology is involved or not — Taylor Swift recently won a lawsuit against a radio host who had sexually assaulted her. Change is clearly happening in the music industry, and the underlying theme is power and money.

The medium, then, seems secondary — a conduit to achieve these goals. That doesn’t make it redundant, as tech is a huge driving force in turning these ambitions into reality. Not to mention the fact that we have no idea which form it will take — if it’s blockchain, how do we deal with surging costs for consumers? If it’s a company like Kobalt, does that give artists the power they’re looking for?

Last year was a transformative one for both Royalty Exchange and the music business at large.

We’re not big on milestone-type posts, but allow us to share a few internal numbers for the sake of illuminating what we think are some broader, macro-industry trends we all should be following in the year ahead.

In 2017, Royalty Exchange saw quantum leaps forward in virtually every performance metric we track. We saw a nearly 100% increase in the number of auctions held (144) and an 84% increase in average auctions per month (12).

In total, we helped artists using our platform raise over $8.8 million dollars, nearly 110% more than the year prior.

That’s new money coming into the music industry being reinvested into creative community. After more than a decade of digital/hardware companies pulling money out of the music community, that’s got to be a refreshing change of pace.

But we can’t take all the credit for these results, as much as we’d like to. The fact is that these results are just as much a factor of broader industry trends just now starting to align.

Here are the main ones we think play the biggest role…

New Industry. New Rules

The music industry has changed. Nearly every rule has been broken or reinvented. Fans consume music differently, and as a result artists get paid differently.

But if the way fans pay for music has changed, it only stands to reason that the rules dictating how songwriters make a living should change as well.

First, that means properly recognizing songwriters for their contributions to the music we all love. Songwriting credits shouldn’t be a secret. Over 70% of songwriters’ income is regulated in some fashion by a government entity. The better these regulators understand the crucial role songwriters play, the better informed their rulings will be.

Second is the need to end any artificial restrictions on how songwriters choose to earn a living. The Music Modernization Act is a great first step to address the regulatory challenges. Equally important is to update the conventional wisdom around “acceptable” ways to finance a career. (UPDATE: The MMA has been updated based on the input of several songwriter organizations. Additionally, there’s an effort to bundle it into an omnibus bill that also includes the CLASSICS Act, AMP Act, Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act, and CASE Act.)

Twenty years ago it was considered “selling out” for artists to license their music for a TV commercial. Now it’s not only an accepted revenue-generating move, but it’s considered a smart marketing/discovery move.

The same is becoming true to the concept of selling royalties. The old adage of “never sell royalties” is a rule for a different age… when selling royalties meant giving up all your rights and all control.

Today’s deals are more flexible, allowing artists to sell only a portion of their royalty income, while retaining all their copyrights, all their control, and all the future income from what they don’t sell. This gives songwriters the options they need using a strategy that public companies have used for decades.

Sony is paying $2.3bn to take control of EMI Music Publishing, cementing its place as the world’s largest music publishing company, with rights to songs by the likes of Queen and Pharrell Williams.

The deal adds a catalogue of 2.1m EMI songs to Sony’s 2.3m. EMI’s catalogue ranges from 20th-century classics including work by Motown artists and Carole King, to more contemporary compositions by Kanye West, Pink, Sam Smith and Drake.

The agreement is Sony’s first major deal under its new chief executive, Kenichiro Yoshida, who noted that the music business has enjoyed a “resurgence” in recent years due to growth in revenues from streaming services provided by companies such as Spotify and Apple.

The state of streaming your content changed forever on May 25, 2018. Did you feel it? Do you know about it? Will you be affected by it? Lots of questions and reasonable because if you are like me you have received dozens of “privacy update notices” from various online services including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and dozens more.

Here is what I have found so far so check it out!

LONDON —Europe is about to introduce some of the toughest online privacy rules in the world: the General Data Protection Regulation, also known as the G.D.P.R. The changes aim to give internet users more control over what’s collected and shared about them, and they punish companies that don’t comply.

Here’s what it means for you.

What are the new rules?The law, which goes into effect on May 25, strengthens individual privacy rights and, more important, it has teeth. Companies can be fined up to 4 percent of global revenue — equivalent to about $1.6 billion for Facebook.

The internet’s grand bargain has long been trading privacy for convenience. Businesses offer free services like email, entertainment and search, and in return they collect data and sell advertising.

But recent privacy scandals involving Facebook and the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica highlight the downsides of that trade-off. The system is opaque and ripe for abuse.

In the meantime, it would seem that the lawsuits have already started!

US news websites including the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News and the Los Angeles Times were inaccessible for millions of European users after missing the May 25 deadline to be GDPR compliant.

At the time of writing users in the European Union were met with the following message when trying to access their websites:

“Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism.”

On the first day of GDPR enforcement, Facebook and Google have been hit with a raft of lawsuits accusing the companies of coercing users into sharing personal data. The lawsuits, which seek to fine Facebook 3.9 billion and Google 3.7 billion euro (roughly $8.8 billion in dollars), were filed by Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems, a longtime critic of the companies’ data collection practices.

GDPR requires clear consent and justification for any personal data collected from users, and these guidelines have pushed companies across the internet to revise their privacy policies and collection practices. But there is still widespread uncertainty over how European regulators will treat the requirements, and many companies are still unpreparedfor enforcement.

Both Google and Facebook have rolled out new policies and products to comply with GDPR, but Schrems’ complaints argue those policies don’t go far enough. In particular, the complaint singles out the way companies obtain consent for the privacy policies, asking users to check a box in order to access services. It’s a widespread practice for online services, but the complaints argue that it forces users into an all-or-nothing choice, a violation of the GDPR’s provisions around particularized consent.

Shrems told the Financial Times that the existing consent systems were clearly noncompliant. “They totally know that it’s going to be a violation,” he said. “They don’t even try to hide it.”

The lawsuits are broken up into specific products, with one filed against Facebook and two others against its Instagram and WhatsApp subsidiaries. A fourth suit was filed against Google’s Android operating system.

Both companies have disputed the charges, arguing that existing measures were adequate to meet GDPR requirements. “We build privacy and security into our products from the very earliest stages,” Google said in a statement, “and are committed to complying with the EU GDPR.”

Facebook offered a similar defense, saying, “We have prepared for the past 18 months to ensure we meet the requirements of the GDPR.”

You have an idea for a project. You want to make sure keep control in the process of taking action. The single most significant shift in being a company is that the U.S. Supreme Court determined back in 2010 that a “company,” has the same rights as an individual does.

To protect yourself, your family and your team, you must be a company! The only one I wrote this blog posting for is you! I’ve helped to raise capital by putting together the right capital strategy. Said one-way capital is attracted to a project, said another way money would avoid you like the plague.

You must think and act like a Corporation! There are thousands of ways to structure your company. The freedom of the individual rights of a sovereign citizen in the USA is now over.

Here are an article that will empower you to take action! Please review them carefully and do your research.

Here is what I found today:

Supreme Court Decision Delivers Blow To Workers’ Rights

In a case involving the rights of tens of millions of private-sector employees, the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, delivered a major blow to workers, ruling for the first time that workers may not band together to challenge violations of federal labor laws.

Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch said that the 1925 Federal Arbitration Act trumps the National Labor Relations Act and that employees who sign employment agreements to arbitrate claims must do so on an individual basis — and may not band together to enforce claims of wage and hour violations.

“The policy may be debatable but the law is clear: Congress has instructed that arbitration agreements like those before us must be enforced as written,” Gorsuch writes. “While Congress is of course always free to amend this judgment, we see nothing suggesting it did so in the NLRA — much less that it manifested a clear intention to displace the Arbitration Act. Because we can easily read Congress’s statutes to work in harmony, that is where our duty lies.”

Ginsburg dissents

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the four dissenters, called the majority opinion “egregiously wrong.” She said the 1925 arbitration law came well before federal labor laws and should not cover these “arm-twisted,” “take-it-or-leave it” provisions that employers are now insisting on.

She noted that workers’ claims are usually small, and many workers fear retaliation. For these reasons, she said, relatively few workers avail themselves of the arbitration option. On the other hand, these problems are largely by a class action suit brought in court on behalf of many employees.

The inevitable result of Monday’s decision, she warned, will be huge under-enforcement of federal and state laws designed to advance the well-being of vulnerable workers. It is up to Congress, she added, to correct the court’s action.

In his oral announcement, Gorsuch took the unusual step of elaborately rebutting Ginsburg’s dissent, which is five pages longer than the majority’s opinion.

A green light for employers

The ruling came in three cases — potentially involving tens of thousands of nonunion employees — brought against Ernst & Young LLP, Epic Systems Corp. and Murphy Oil USA Inc.

Each required its individual employees, as a condition of employment, to waive their rights to join a class-action suit. In all three cases, employees tried to sue together, maintaining that the amounts they could obtain in individual arbitration were dwarfed by the legal fees they would have to pay. Ginsburg’s dissent noted that a typical Ernst & Young employee would likely have to spend $200,000 to recover only about $1,900 in overtime pay.

WordPress claims to power 30% of the internet. I would like to say that I believe them. It would be interesting to note what percentage of their users are on the official WP platform and which users have downloaded the software to their server. Of course, I can’t answer any of this because I don’t work for WordPress.

The reason I know that WordPress will continue to grow is that their platform has created a space to network with thousands if not millions of other bloggers and postings.

The reason WordPress is on my mind is that I am looking at the plethora of platforms that are out there and each time I come back to WordPress.

From 2006 until 2009 I blogged at Typepad which was and is a competitor to WordPress. Typepad’s “Program it yourself platform” is known as Moveable Type. When I deleted my original WordPress site, it was gone and erased from the internet.

It was a lovely surprise to go back to my 2006 site and still see it online and intact.

Typepad might be a way to go for some of you who also need a stable and secure platform. Each online service their strengths and weaknesses but I have found it comes down to the interface and how fast you can get your content up there.

First of all, as I reported some months ago, 25% of college students in America have received a diagnosis of a mental disorder, or are on psychiatric drugs. I mention this to indicate how widespread psychiatric control has become.

That statistic has been reported by NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

NAMI also states: “Approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S.—43.8 million, or 18.5%—experiences mental illness in a given year.”

These figures are earthshaking. They reflect a relentless push, by organized psychiatry and their pharmaceutical partners, to expand the diagnoses of mental disorders and the toxic drugging that follows.

Indeed, if you consult the DSM, the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, you’ll find listed 297 distinct and defined and labeled disorders. This is marketing at an awesome level.

Here is another substantial reason to get off of your FaceBook Account. The EU (European Union) is shoving their rules and regulations down every American user.

Facebook announced Wednesday it would begin rolling out changes to how it handles private data this week to comply with forthcoming EU rules, with European residents seeing the measures first.

The social network, which has been rocked by disclosures about hijacking of personal data on tens of millions of its users, said it will start implementing “new privacy experiences” to comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which become effective May 25.

“Everyone—no matter where they live—will be asked to review important information about how Facebook uses data and make choices about their privacy on Facebook,” said a statement from chief privacy officer Erin Egan and deputy general counsel Ashlie Beringer.

“We’ll begin by rolling these choices out in Europe this week.”

Under the new policy, Facebook users will be asked to review and make choices about ads they receive, including whether they want Facebook to use data from third parties.

Facebook users will also be asked to review and choose what to share about the political, religious, and relationship information on their profiles.

Additionally, users will be allowed to opt in or out of use of facial recognition technology.

The statement said users will be told that facial recognition is optional, but that it could offer some benefit, such as being notified when someone is using an unauthorized picture.

“We not only want to comply with the law, but also go beyond our obligations to build new and improved privacy experiences for everyone on Facebook,” Egan and Beringer wrote.

The news comes a week after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg faced 10 hours of questioning in two congressional panels following revelations that personal data was harvested on 87 million users by Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy working for Donal Trump’s 2016 campaign.

The issue for me as always is privacy. This is what Steve Jobs had to say about Privacy back in the day!

“My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists and overly concerned about tech, and they say that none of their friends have the same rules… That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.” – Steve Jobs